Re: [Xen-users] Xen or KVM

[Mark Schneider <ms@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Am 16.05.2012 12:04, schrieb Arindam Choudhury:

> From: fbcyborg@xxxxxxxxx
> Date: Wed, 16 May 2012 11:56:31 +0200
> Subject: Re: [Xen-users] Xen or KVM
> To: arindam@xxxxxxxx
> CC: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> On 16 May 2012 11:49, Arindam Choudhury <arindam@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am new to virtualization and I am having the obvious hassle of choosing
> > between Xen and KVM.
> Hi,
>
> it depends on how much time you have. I prefer XEN, absolutely, but if you
> hurry and you are not patient, KVM could be a valid alternative.
> Of course if you ask here this question, it is unlikely to find people
> suggesting
> KVM instead of XEN ;-)

The question is why you personally like Xen? What benefits you getting over KVM?

Arindam,

After playing for over a year with Xen (Xen/XCP/XenServer) and KVM I tend now to use KVM due to low I/O performance of Xen/XCP/XenServer when using HVM. PVMs in Xen have probably a bit better I/O-performance but quite a lot of overhead to manage it with different operating systems (I don't run any MS OS).

Due to my tests (HVM) on the same hardware (like HP DL385g7 servers with two Opteron 6180SE CPUs and 32 or 64GB RAM, an additional RAID-controller P410 (in total 16 hard disk drives) and additional quad port 1GBit NIC) the network performance on KVM is at least 3 times higher compare to Xen. Also the I/O-performance for storage (RAID60 or RAID50) is at least two times higher on KVM.

The free available version of XCP or XenServer has outdated templates for HVM / PVMs and it looks like that Citrix doesn't really have commercial interesst to improve them. I don't think that it will change in the near future as most active Xen developers are working for Citrix.

People like you, me and many others are a kind of unpaid Xen software testers. I can myself invest some of time for testing of free software products and help to impove them if I can use them without all the licensing issues. I was even thinking about buying commercial XenServer ... but due to high costs of the licenses and management costs I decided simply to buy new hardware to have much better performance (DB cluster applications) and more calculatlion power for the same price and less administration overhead.

Another issue is, that I am *not* going to use MS-clients (XenCenter MS-based GUI) for adiministration of Linux/Unix environment. In my opinion Citrix products are getting more and more MS oriented (what probably makes sense from bean counters' point of view as they follow the goal of biggest turnover and profit).

Independent of my own opinion above I have to say that XenServer has quite nice CLI (xe) I used for scripting even somehow it lucks some logical syntax rules (eg. you can export a template but you *can't* import it with the same "import" (instead of export) syntax). Importing them as VMs and changing an appriopriate flag after didn't work as expected.

My current recomendation is currently KVM based on uBuntu 12.04. Just uBuntu and not another one as other commercial Linux distributors play other games ...

Regards, Mark

ps. All trademarks or registered trademarks herein are the property of their respective owners.

-- 
ms@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

http://rsync.it-infrastrukturen.org

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